Thursday, May 20, 2010

Pipes and Inputs Cleanup. Line in Polyline mode. Others

There are some design limitations that are for good reasons but some of them may appear silly to some. One of those limitations is that MetaActions (which are automatically generated actions based on defined dependencies) can be filled by command line when Actions (the tools/shapes that are defined as requiring resources from NaroCAD workspace) cannot. On the other side MetaActions cannot work with multiple nodes at once, just with one current node.The polyline tool can work in two modes: simply as one shape, and NaroCAD can fill it as a meta-action (and will operate more or less as a spline), or can work as an mutiple lines shape. The first way of thinking have some advantages, but also disadvangates: the polyline, being one single shape, will make you annoyed if you want to delete just one edge that is drawn by mistake.But on the other hand the line in polyline mode will miss the command line features.So the changes to make both actions (line in polyline mode and polyline) did face some need of change. The biggest is that command line may be accessible to regular actions, but not only command line control but also the parser. Those changes are more subtle from the user standpoint, but in short if the parser will have changes (like supporting just two coordinates), this will work for all actions (and metaactions) without making necessary for every action that use command line to parse the string that command line gives.For my bad the polyline itself have some issues and I did not fully tested the parser separations but I will target those fixes tomorrow (hopefully will be fixed all together).